MAX was awesome. I got to join Kieth Peters and John Grden for lunch which was a real treat for me. I’m a big fan of Kieth and his Bit-101.com site. Then there are his books Making Things Move ( AS2 version / AS3 version ) that are incredible. If you’re a designer just wading into Actionscript then I highly recommend them as a starting place.

After Grant Skinner’s session I walked with him across the convention hall the next session and had a nice discussion along the way. I had to miss most of a session that I wanted to attend but it was worth it.

All of the sessions were recorded and it has been said that they will all be available as a channel on the Adobe Media Player. We just have to wait for a little while.

My favorite session was the Flash Player Internals with Jim Corbett, Lee Thomason. They did a great tag-team job of presenting. Getting a tour under the hood of the Flash player by the guys who work on it everyday was awesome.

A few notes from Flash Player Internals

• Astro may add fading and masking of device fonts without the cashAsBitmap hack.
• Astro may add chaining to embedded fonts.
• Avoid the scope chain to get the best performance out of your code. If you’re not really sure about the scope chain then read this article.
• Suppose you are creating a game or something that is extremely code intensive. If you would like to gauge the performance of each client machine and then tune your code appropriately then apply a blur filter to a video and render that to a Bitmap. Then see what sort of performance that client is getting. You could do something like that during the preload so that when the main code begins to run you can tune the code to run smoothly on that machine. Kind of a slow, medium, fast toggle for your code.
• A question was asked, “Have you written any code to explore giving authors access to multi threading?” The answer was, “No Comment” with a grin. Can you say Flash player 11 feature? :-)

A few notes from AS3 best practises:

• If it’s a constant then make it of type const.
• If you need to iterate over an ArrayCollection then use a for-each loop. It’s faster.
• Use weak reference listeners unless you’re doing something like loading content or creating a timer.
• If you remove a loaded image from the display list then UNLOAD it.
• null out references to get them garbage collected.

The Lego Vagina Award

Scott Petersen’s C/C++ interpreter for Actionscript wins this award hands down. When he showed Quake 2 running in Actionscript my friends just about fell out of their seats.

If there were such a thing as a lego booby award – second place to the lego Vagina – then it would go to Shai Avidan on “Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing”. That shit was amazing.

Random Links

Hydra:

• Download the toolkit on Adobe Labs
• Kaourantin has a nice technical overview

Videos

• Peter Elst has a nice video overview of the sneaks session broken up by nicely so that you can watch just the sneaks your interested in. I’m sitting just to the left of Peter so when he pans to the left screen you can see my head in the way. Sorry. That’s also me adding narration, such as “You’ve got to be frakking kidding me” during Scott Petersen’s presentation about the C/C++ interpreter.
• Lee Brimelow has a nice interview with Justin Everett-Church about the Flash player 10

Peter deHaan has the play-by-play of MAX.

• Blogging from Adobe MAX 2007 – North America
• Adobe MAX 2007 Keynote (Day 2 Edition)
• Rough notes from the Adobe MAX 2007 North America Sneak Peeks

Geeks of the world unite

Doug McCune has a great shot of geeks in 3D glasses

Movement has meaning

I can’t remember where that quote came from. It just ended up in my notepad but it really strikes a chord. For years Flash has been dissed for people using it to create sites with poor usability. But Flash is only a tool and it took some time for the community to really learn how to take advantage of the capabilities to create more usable sites than can be created from a more static approach.

With the upgrades to text rendering and 3D coming in Flash player 10 there is really no limit to the sort of interface that we can create in Flash. The limit is now our imagination. Not the tool.

ColdFusion speakers rock

I attended two sessions about ColdFusion: Mike Nimer’s and Simeon Bateman’s. Both are just amazing presenters. I think it the secret is in the code. There must be some undocumented CFperfectPresentation tag that they know about.